What was my astonishment when I awoke to find a quantity of beautiful, fresh flowers lying upon me and beside me!  I sprang up, but could see nothing unusual, except that in the house above me there was a window filled with fragrant shrubs and flowers, behind which a parrot talked and screamed incessantly.  I picked up the scattered flowers, tied them together, and stuck the nosegay in my button-hole.  Then I began to discourse with the parrot; it amused me to see him get up and down in his gilded cage with all sorts of odd twists and turns of his head, and always stepping awkwardly over his own toes.  But before I was aware of it he was scolding me for a furfante!  Even though it were only a senseless bird, it irritated me.  I scolded him back; we both got angry; the more I scolded in German, the more he abused me in Italian.

Suddenly I heard some one laughing behind me.  I turned quickly, and perceived the painter of the morning.  “What nonsense are you at now!” he said.  “I have been waiting for you for half an hour.  The air has grown cooler:  we will go to a garden in the suburbs where you will find several fellow-countrymen, and perhaps learn something further of the German Countess.”

I was charmed with this proposal, and we set out immediately, the parrot screaming out abuse of me as I left him.

After we had walked for a long while outside of the city, ascending by a narrow, stony pathway an eminence dotted with villas and vineyards, we reached a small garden very high up, where several young men and maidens were sitting in the open air about a round table.  As soon as we made our appearance they all signed to us to keep silence, and pointed toward the other end of the garden, where in a large, vine-wreathed arbor two beautiful ladies were sitting opposite each other at a table.  One was singing, while the other accompanied her on the guitar.  Between them stood a pleasant-looking gentleman, who occasionally beat time with a small baton.  The setting sun shone through the vine-leaves, upon the fruits and flasks of wine with which the table was provided, and upon the plump, white shoulders of the lady with the guitar.  The other one grimaced so that she looked convulsed, but she sang in Italian in so extremely artistic a manner that the sinews in her neck stood out like cords.

Just as she was executing a long cadenza with her eyes turned up to the skies, while the gentleman beside her held his baton suspended in the air waiting the moment when she would fall into the beat again, the garden gate was flung open, and a girl looking very much heated, and a young man with a pale, delicate face, entered, quarreling violently.  The conductor, startled, stood with raised baton like a petrified conjurer, although the singer had some time before snapped short her long trill and had arisen angrily from the table.  All the others turned upon the new arrivals in a rage.  “You savage,” some one at the round table called out, “you